There are a number of techniques for reporting on and analysing your
events and participants.

The event dashboard gives a quick overview of your upcoming events
showing for each event the number of registrations and their statuses
(how many are registered, how many are counted, how many are pending for
different reasons). The dashboard is limited to 12 events scheduled to
start at a date closest to today. This is most likely not to be
sufficient to organizations with many scheduled events.

This chapter outlines other ways that provide more detailed and
customised analysis using CiviCRM's search features and CiviReport.

If you are interested in the financial aspects of events, you may also
find the Reports and analysis chapter in Contributions useful.

CiviCRM makes an important distinction between contacts and event
participants. Sometimes it is useful to get the answer to your event
related question in terms of contacts, e.g. which contacts came to
events in 2011. Other times it is more useful to have the answer in
terms of participants, e.g. how many training sessions did we deliver as
part of our sexual health education programme this year. It is important
to take this into consideration when carrying out a search for event
attendees.

The Find participants search allows you to search based on
participant data and return participant data. The Advanced
search allows you to search based on most participant information and
combine that with other contact information and return contacts. You
can also choose Participant from the Display Results As column
to show participants rather than contacts.

Searching based on these criteria gives you access to simple totals. You
can also export your search results as CSV for further analysis in your
spreadsheet software.

Reports have several features that cannot be accomplished by search. For instance, you cannot aggregate data from multiple events at once or
limit the date of registration very flexibly. Also, repeating the same
searches over and over can be very time consuming. Searches can be set
as Smart Groups but this leads to a proliferation of groups.

The solution is to set up reports for each event or a collection of
events. The reports can be automatically assigned to a designated
submenu (e.g. under Events > Reports) or made available as dashlets for
the main dashboard (this is described in a subsection below).

Out of the box, CiviCRM comes with four reports designed to help you
analyse events. Of these, Event Participants List is the most
useful. It will display both participant and individual data and all
custom data. All of these can also be used as filters.

Attendee List provides a list of event attendees and can be filtered
to provide provide a list for just one event. You add one blank column
on the left of the list and tone, two or three at the right of the list
and so create an event sign up sheet.

The Event Income Detail and Event Income Summary work
together to show details of revenue from events. The summary report is
suitable for showing total income for a series of events, all your
conference in 2011, for example. Clicking on one of those events will
give you more details about the event breakdown of the income per role
and per status. It can also be displayed in graphical form as Pie Chart
or Bar Chart.

If you haven't already created any Event Reports, see the following
chapter Reports and Analysis for instructions on how to create reports.
You must then ensure that the report you want to display is available
for the dashboard:

From the navigation menu, click Reports and select the report
you wish to display.

In the Report Settings area, check the Available for
Dashboard? box.

Click Update Report.

Once the report is available for the dashboard, you can then:

Navigate to Home to view the dashboard.

Click Configure Your Dashboard.

Drag the desired report from the Available Dashlets area into either
the Left Column or Right Column of the dashboard area, and click
Done.

You should now see your report on your home dashboard. To view the
latest updated information for your report as well as any other
items you've included on your dashboard, click Refresh Dashboard
Data.